1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical diagnosis support device, a virtual microscope system, and a specimen support member for use therewith, for acquiring information to support medical diagnosis from analysis of a specimen.
2. Description of Related Art
There has been known as one of pathological examination methods tissue diagnosis which makes diagnosis of a disease or examines how much a lesion site has grown by collecting tissue of the lesion site and observing it by a microscope. Such tissue diagnosis as this is also referred to as biopsy. It is widely practiced by biopsy to observe an enlarged view of a thin slice of several micron thickness, of a block specimen obtained from a removed organ and/or a pathological specimen obtained from needle aspiration biopsy by using a microscope, in order to analyze various pathological possibilities of a case. Above all, observation based on transmittance by using an optical microscope has been one of the most common observation methods because this method not only has a long history of application to observation but also only requires a device which is relatively cheap and easy to handle. In the case of this method of using an optical microscope, since a thinly sliced specimen fails to absorb or scatter the light and is almost colorless and transparent in its intact form, the specimen is generally stained with a dye before observation.
According to tissue diagnosis, a stained specimen is photographed to acquire a specimen image and then the specimen image is served for diagnosis by a doctor. However, when a doctor makes a diagnosis by just looking at a specimen image, his/her subject heavily influences the diagnosis. Therefore, in recent years, there has been developed a medical diagnosis support device for analyzing a specimen image obtained by photography to acquire various characteristic quantity, quantitatively judge the characteristics quantity and detect or classify lesion site, so that objective information is presented to a doctor.
Further, staining methods and analysis methods of a pathological specimen are progressing every year and there have been made proposals regarding various staining solutions, morphological analysis and staining analysis. It is easily anticipated that techniques of such staining methods and analysis methods based thereon as described above will continue to make progress in future. Accordingly, it is necessary to select the most suitable analysis method in accordance with a given staining method of a specimen in order to obtain appropriate information to support medical diagnosis.
However, some analysis methods such as “detection of cancer invasion” and “detection of signals” are specific to each particular medical diagnosis support device and thus a user cannot add or modify the analysis method in accordance with the content of a diagnosis. In view of this, there has been proposed in recent years a diagnosis support device capable of memorizing plural analysis methods (diagnosis support contents) to allow a user to optionally utilize a specific analysis method in accordance with an object or contents (e.g. JP 2003-126045).